


Confessions

by writewithurheart



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 05:00:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3434483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writewithurheart/pseuds/writewithurheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thea goes to Felicity looking for answers about her brother being the Arrow after the events of 3x14</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confessions

**Author's Note:**

> Based on Tumblr prompt: “Thea ask Felicity to tell her the Arrow’s story from the beginning. While Felicity tells the story, as she remembers all they went through with Oliver, she’s becoming less and less mad at him”. 
> 
> Just a little something I wrote. Hope you like it!

...

_Knock knock knock._

Irritated, Felicity flings her door open, prepared to yell and Ray or Oliver, whichever one is stupid enough to show up at her apartment on Saturday which is most definitely her day off. If it’s Diggle or Roy, they get a free pass, but not without a glare or a frustrated huff. But instead of her mostly likely suspects, she finds herself face to face with the one and only Thea Queen.

“You’re Felicity, right? The beautiful computer genius?” Thea asks tentatively as Felicity just stares at her, her mouth open in shock.

Felicity closes her mouth with a snap, shaking her head to jumpstart the thinking process again and smiles. “Yes. That’s me. Felicity Smoak, bona fide computer genius. Do you want to come inside?”

Thea smiles and crosses the threshold as Felicity looks down and realizes she’s still in her pajamas. A groan escapes her. While they’re far from indecent, she’s wearing her favorite green pajama pants and one of Oliver’s t-shirts she stole from the Foundry after he left to fight Ras. She told herself she wasn’t going to wear it after their talk in the alley, but she had succumbed last night after hearing what had happened when Oliver and Thea were on Lian Yu. The shirt no longer smelled like him, but it still made her feel safe and warded off the nightmares.

“So...no offense, Thea, but what are you doing here?” Felicity can’t help but ask, trying not to focus on the fact that Thea’s staring at the Robin Hood poster over her TV. “Because I thought you would have ninja things to do with Oliver, being that you know now. And what with the Malcolm Merlyn training...” which she is completely NOT okay with and highly discourages, but who listens to her anymore? No one.

“I don’t want anything to do with that man. Did you get that poster after you found out Oliver was the Arrow?” She twists back, quick to change the subject.

Felicity smirks at the poster. She had gotten it as a gag gift for Oliver’s birthday shortly after her first mission. She had purchased it while slightly inebriated to celebrate Walter’s safe return. Then of course, the Undertaking happened and no one was really in the mood to celebrate. Somehow, instead of giving it to Oliver, it ended up hanging on her wall, a gentle reminder of the good she did every night. “It was supposed to be a gift for him. To make him laugh.”

“So why’s it on your wall?” Thea asks.               

She sighs. “If we’re going to talk about your brother, I need some coffee first. Or something stronger. I think I have a bottle of wine around her somewhere.” She’s serious about the alcohol, but once she finds herself staring at the bottle of cheap red wine, she decides she should be a grown up and not drink her feelings. She glances over her shoulder. “Do you want some coffee?”

Thea nods, moving into the kitchen as Felicity pours the brown liquid into the mugs. “I thought you and Oliver were close.”

“Your brother and I are complicated. Here’s the creamer. I’m apparently out of milk, but I can find some sugar if you want.” She pours a healthy amount of creamer into her own coffee and hands it off to Thea.

“Define complicated.”

Felicity sighs. “Thea...I’m happy you know now, but I don’t really feel comfortable talking about my love life with you. Not that it’s really a love life. We only went on one date and we technically didn’t even get food. The restaurant blew up before the waiter even took our order. And it just sort of went downhill from there. Plus, have you met your brother? He’s not exactly emotionally accessible. And then he has like a hundred different ways of saying ‘I love you’ without actually saying those words, but no matter how much he says it nothing changes because he’s got a boulder for a head.” She finishes with an angry huff before taking a deep breath. “And that’s why we’re not talking about your brother.”

Thea blinks in shock. “Ooookay. Complicated. Got it.”

Felicity relaxes, dropping to sit at her kitchen table and gesturing Thea to follow her example. The brunette stares into her cup for a couple minutes, absorbed in the swirling brown liquid. Felicity waits patiently, sipping slowly from her own mug. She doesn’t want to rush Thea. She’s like Oliver: she’ll talk when she’s ready and there’s no use pushing.

“Can you...can you tell me about it? All of it. From the beginning. Ollie’s been telling me bits and pieces, but he’s my brother and he’s not going to tell me everything.” Her brown eyes are wide and terrified as they meet Felicity’s.

She smiles softly. “Digg knows more than I do. I joined six months in, so I can’t tell you much before that. I don’t know everything.”

“Just...whatever you can tell me. Please. I mean, you joined back when he was still killing, still working in the shadows.” Thea rests her hand on Felicity’s, squeezing it. She just wants to know as much as she can. “Why did you stay?”

Felicity sighs. This is going to get into dangerous territory, but she can’t say no to Thea. She’s doing exactly what Felicity would do in her position: getting all the information she can. So against her better judgment, Felicity gives in:

“It started, at least for me, when your brother walked into my cubicle in IT and asked me to retrieve information from his laptop-“

“Why did he need you to get information from his laptop?” Thea frowns.

“Well, for starters, it was riddled with bullet holes.” Felicity smirks at the memory. “And he led with some ridiculous line about spilling a latte on it and then said his coffee shop was in a bad neighborhood.” She laughs and shakes her head.

“And you bought that?”

“Thea, if you keep interrupting, this story is going to take days. And of course not! It was ridiculous, but when your boss’s boss’s boss’s stepson asks you to do something, you do it.” She stares into her cup for a moment before continuing. Back then everything was so simple. He was the hot guy who came in with ridiculous requests and it was a little crush that wasn’t going anywhere. It’s not so simple now...

“So what happened?” Thea prods.

Felicity shakes her head. “Oh, yeah, so he kept coming to me with increasingly out there things: needing an arrow manufacturer for a friend, decoding a security fob for a scavenger hunt, analyzing an energy drink in a syringe (which turned out to be Vertigo). At the same time, Walter had me looking into a notebook with names he got from your mom, which turned out to be a list of Malcolm’s accomplices in the Undertaking and the same list your brother was working off of.

“So long story short, despite Oliver’s lies, I trusted him, so I gave him the notebook after Walter disappeared. A couple days later, he appeared in the back of my car after getting shot. There was blood everywhere and he was in his leather’s. I took him to the Foundry where Digg patched him up.”

“And then you joined the team.” At Felicity’s glare, Thea holds her hands up in surrender. “Okay, no more interruptions.”

Felicity starts playing with the collar of the t-shirt. “Yeah. I joined the team to find Walter. That was my goal. I was only there to get Walter back.” She chuckles. “Your brother and I didn’t exactly see eye to eye back then. He had his list that he was working off of, but I didn’t want to kill people with families. I once locked the door to stop him from going out and he got all growly, demanding I leave it alone. I think he expected me to back down. He still left, but the man made it home to put his kids to bed.

“And then I found a money trail that led to Walter and you know how that worked out.” She blushes at the memory of the casino but pushes on. “Your mom called Malcolm after your brother told you Walter was dead, and that’s how we tracked down where they were keeping Walter. We got him back, but then we knew Malcolm was behind the Undertaking.”

She pauses again. She can’t keep talking about this stuff. It’s too confusing, drawing up old memories and sorrows, but she presses on because she knows Thea needs this. She needs to understand. So she doesn’t hold anything back, telling her exactly what happened: how they disabled the earthquake machines, how her brother tried to save Tommy, how he disappeared to Lian Yu for a couple months. She fights back a smile recounting her and Diggle’s trip to the island and her brother’s tendency for Tarzan-esque tricks.

Felicity tells her all about Sara’s return even though it feels like losing her friend all over again and Thea cries because she knows she’s the one who shot Sara Lance. Felicity stutters through the incident with the Count, wondering once more how everything between them got so complicated. She explains everything with Slade right up to the middle of the battle. She can’t bring herself to get past Slade taking Laurel.

Thea waits as Felicity stares into her third cup of coffee, noticing tears pooling in the blonde’s eyes. She squeezes Felicity’s hand. “I know this part. Oliver and his team work with the police and the assassins to defeat Slade’s men. And then he goes after Slade. He gets Laurel back.”

Felicity swallows thickly, shaking her head. “You don’t...it was more complicated than that. Yes, Slade took Laurel, but he wasn’t going to rescue her. He had to protect the city.” She has to stop again.

“But he saved Laurel,” Thea prods. “He did both.”

“There was a problem. We couldn’t get close enough to Slade to give him the cure. He was two steps ahead of us the whole time.” Felicity focuses on her green nail polish for strength to get through this. “We had to get the Mirakuru out of Slade’s system for your brother to win. And he would see Oliver coming from a mile away.”

“So how did you do it?” Thea could see Felicity wasn’t going to get through this story without her prodding. “If Oliver couldn’t get close, how did he give Slade he cure? Because I met Slade and he’s scary strong even without the Mirakuru.”

“Your brother didn’t dose him. I did.” The confession is strong even as Felicity’s hands grip her mug so hard her knuckles turn white.

“You? But how?”

Felicity draws in a shaky breath and forces a laugh. “Slade took Laurel because he wanted to kill the woman your brother loved. So we convinced him, he had the wrong woman.”

“What? No. Ollie wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t put you in danger.”

“He took me to the mansion where Slade had cameras and told me he wanted me safe.” She can see his serious eyes boring into his, feel the same confusion at his words, read the sincerity over his face as he said those three little words she could never forget. She swallows hard. “He left me there with the cure to wait for Slade.”

“What?! No. That’s-“

“It worked.” Felicity lifts her eyes to meet Thea’s, her eyes filled with steely determination as she’s back in that basement with Slade’s blade to her neck again. “Slade took me to draw your brother out. I stabbed Slade in the neck with the serum and Oliver defeated him. Then we left him on that island. And you know basically everything that’s happened since this fall.”

Thea stares at Felicity incredulously. It takes a beat for her to formulate an answer. “But why...how...how did you convince Slade that Laurel wasn’t the one?”

Felicity looks away, only to have her eyes land on the Robin Hood poster. Her words come out as a whisper. “He told me he loved me. He has a tendency to do that before he goes off to fight to the death.” Sadly she turns back to her now-cold cup of coffee.

She’s thankful Thea doesn’t say anything, doesn’t try to comfort her. They just sit in silence for a moment.

“Well, Ollie’s an idiot.” Thea declares. “He obviously cares about you. He just has this twisted sense of honor-“

“I know, Thea, but it’s not enough for me.” Felicity sighs again. “He loves me, I love him, but sometimes that’s not enough. I need someone who loves me enough to risk the danger. I need someone who wants to live in the sun sometimes and not just in a dark basement waiting to die.”

“That’s not Ollie anymore.”

“No, but I can’t keep waiting for him to be what I need. I have to move on with my life. He can’t just kiss me or tell me he loves me when nothing changes and he still thinks we can’t be together. I can’t get caught up in it all over again.” She feels the tear roll down her cheek and she swipes at it.

Thea reaches out and pulls her into a hug, patting her head. “Shhh. It’s okay. I’m sorry, Lis.”

She pulls back with a watery smile, sniffling. She forces a laugh. “I must look like a drowned rat. I haven’t even changed into actual clothes.”

Thea joins in the laugh, wishing her brother would get his head out of his ass because the girl in front of her is really amazing. She lowers her voice. “Thank you.”

Felicity nods. “You deserve to know. Your brother is a good man, even if he makes some stupid choices.”

“Like working with Malcolm Merlyn,” Thea agrees caustically, practically spitting out the name.

Felicity raises an eyebrow at the reaction, but nods.

“It’s a stupid decision, but he keeps insisting that we need him to fight Ras Al Ghul.”

Felicity sighs. “He’s doing what he thinks he has to to protect you. Not that I agree with him. In fact, I definitely don’t like this idea. But he’s not listening to anyone on this.”

“Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?” She frowns at Thea. She hasn’t been rambling, not really anyway.

“This whole time you haven’t said his name once.”

Felicity sighs. “Like I said, your brother and I are complicated.”

“You slept in his shirt. How complicated can it be?”

So she did notice that. “Thea...”

“Okay, okay. I get it. Not really my business.” She holds her hands up in surrender. “But you two are basically perfect for each other.”

“And a world of complicated.” Felicity grabs their cups, rinsing them in the sink before placing them in the dishwasher.

Thea contemplate the blonde, thinking about the look her brother got on his face whenever he talked about Felicity. It was a dopey, I-can’t-think-about-her-without-smiling face that she had never seen on him before. “It’s going to work out with you and Oliver, you know.”

Felicity turns to look at her with a small smile. “It’s not that simple, Thea.”

“Oh, I get that, but these things always work out.”

Felicity shakes her head skeptically, but Thea smirks to herself. Oliver and Felicity are perfect for each other. They’re going to get past this and she’s going to be a bridesmaid at their wedding. She’s already decided. And what Thea Queen wants, Thea Queen gets.


End file.
